As far as I’m aware, there are two schools of thought when deciding a theme. An iterative strategy where you start with your first theme idea, then build a mechanic around it, and then revisit the theme then revisit the mechanics and so on and so forth until you feel like you have a good game. The other is to make a mechanic, and then use the theme to help solidify or explain the mechanics. I chose to do the second strategy.

I chose the second strategy because there were two stories that really made sense to me. One was an article I read about how the theme of Plants vs Zombies did an amazing job teaching the player what a tower defense game was. Plants are things that once you put them down, they can’t move. Zombies are things that come in waves and you should kill them. Plants Vs Zombies meant that you use the plants to fight the zombies. In simplicity, beauty. 

The second story is this concept of white boxing. The game should be fun, even if every asset was replaced with white boxes. Would mario be fun if instead of the plumber we know, we were a red box? Or would Overwatch be fun if we were white cubes running around a map of grey cubes? I believe the answer is yes. The concept of whiteboxing was also appealing to me because I’m  a developer, not an artist, so it let me develop my ideas and front load some work before I got other people involved. 

So back to Meexarps. Meexarps started out as scraps of paper in a large mixing bowl where I would play as the computer and control the game for some friends who were willing to playtest. From there I took about two weeks to prototype where everything was boxes. After the prototype, I started thinking about the deficiencies of my unnamed game. I wanted to express that the game should be focused on learning rather than getting things right, it should be more about having fun together than scoring the most points.

I worked with the incredibly talented Regina Yan (http://reginayan.me/) and she walked me through a couple exercises. First we created a mood board of images based on things I like and wanted the game to be like (I chose Jackbox, Elite Beat Agents, Scooby Doo and Gravity Falls (for the “mystery” aspect)). From there we brainstormed ideas that both fit my mood board and helped explain the mechanics of the game. A couple first ideas were: 

1. We are all on a car trip and we’re trying to pass the time with personality questions (helps solve the focus on fun problem).
2. We are all amateur psychological analysts and we are put in a group learning session in order to practice our psychoanalysis skills (Goofy, and helps solve the focus on learning problem)
3. We were robots learning to become human. But in order to do so, we must learn how to identify different personalities.

In the end, we spun off the third idea into aliens doing research on friendship. After we came up with a theme, it was finally time to come up with a name. This was way harder than I expected. I thought I could come up with a name from a theme in less than an hour. It ended up taking 6 hours over the course of a couple weeks (I played the, “let’s marinate on this” card). 

The first thing I did was Google “how to name a game”. This article was amazing https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ElyotGrant/20140924/226369/How_to_name_a_video_game_in_5_steps.php. I highly recommend reading this if you need guidance. The tl;dr is there are 4 ways to name a game, Actual words, Made up words, Phrases, Portmanteaus. I chose to use a made up word because I wanted to have better Google search results, and it fit the alien theme very well. Then I set rules for my name. 

1. I wanted a double vowel, because it was cute
2. I wanted it to have an x in it, because that sounded more outer spacey
3. I wanted it to be short

So then I went on the exercise of creating a new word that matched these rules for every letter of the alphabet. Then I whittled them down until I eventually got tired and chose one at random. Meexarps in particular was created as an anagram of Pixar, with the i replaced with a double e. I consulted Regina and she said “it doesn’t sound wrong” and that’s how the name Meexarps got started! It doesn’t sound wrong is a great way to start naming your game because the more you say the name, the more real it feels. Now I can’t think of the characters as anything other than Meexarps! And as a bonus, we are a totally unique Google hit. 

Well that’s it for today. I ended up typing way more than I expected. Thanks for reading!

Don't forget to checkout our website https://betakyros.github.io/Meexarps/